EVERYDAY TOWEL

EVERYDAY TOWEL

40.0052.00

The perfect companion: a handkerchief to ease one's grief, a lovely set of napkins for heartfelt gatherings, a reminder of the wonder of handwork and the rainbow beauty of earth's bounty.

Each cloth varies in color and design and will be packaged at random—if one in particular strikes your fancy, please email support@collectivequarterly.com with your order number and a note about which cloth you prefer.

Designed and hand-woven by "A Little Weather" outside of Asheville, North Carolina.

Specs:

100% cotton

Dimensions: 10" x 12"

Hand-dyed, hand-woven

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An Interview With Jessica Green

There’s a tiny glowing beacon at the top of a little hill in North Carolina. Jessica Green’s one-bedroom Appalachian cabin sits between two mountains and is surrounded by her sheep, cows, pigs and chickens. From her house, she can see her weaving studio, where she creates handspun coverlets, handkerchiefs, towels and more. The short walk to the studio takes her through a patch of woods and a small, pasture flowering fields, falling leaves and glistening snow. She’s been weaving for eight years now, and she’s lived in the vibrant farming community of Sandy Mush for two and a half. Every day brings a new moment of mindfulness and gratitude.

Is this how you pictured your life when you were growing up?

It is. It’s an amazing feeling — to feel like all of my childhood dreams are present in my life. It’s miraculous. When your dreams become real, and then there’s all the imperfection of reality that goes along with it, it’s a beautiful thing.

At what point did you know weaving was going to be your path?

That happened pretty late; I had never seen weaving, had never seen a loom until my 20s. It wasn’t until a couple years after graduating college that I was doing some natural dyeing for a weaver and finally got to see a loom. And she immediately invited me to sit down and weave at her loom. And sitting at her loom, there was a profound experience of homecoming. And I just wept. I restructured my life to figure out how to make weaving a big part of it.

Did you initially approach weaving from the perspective of functional value or artistic beauty?

From the beginning, it was really about function. When I found weaving, it was like, "Here is this place where I can be making something and really pursuing its craft, but I can be fully functionally oriented.” But my work is exorbitantly expensive, so that inherently makes it non-functional. So even though my intention is to make a blanket that is a piece of warmth and everyday use, it's available to such a small amount of people that it's not functional. So my idea of function has changed over the course of being a weaver.

Do you feel a tie to all the weavers who have gone before you?

Very, very strongly. My blood ancestry is really important to me, and I feel a connection equally as strongly through weavers throughout time as I do with my blood relatives. And particularly being in Appalachia, this is a place where weaving never died. And there are so many role models of women who were kind of constantly reviving weaving and giving it back to women as a vocational art. And I feel them all the time.

Has it been difficult to carve out a niche for yourself as a businesswoman in a rural area?

Everyone is so, so excited to have young, hardworking people moving out to the country, particularly young people with the intention of really staying and making a homestead here. I think it can be hard for people that I'm a woman. For the most part, they respect the business and they're excited about it; there's a lot of support and enthusiasm. It just sometimes comes out in funny ways.